RobertReich’s sobering msg for wealthy elites: You’ll soon be poor if you keep screwing over workers

[Ferd Berfel]

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/02/robert-reichs-sobering-message-for-wealthy-elites-youll-soon-be-poor-if-you-keep-screwing-over-workers/

ou are the captains of American industry, the titans of Wall Street, and the billionaires who for decades have been the backbone of the Republican Party.

You’ve invested your millions in the GOP in order to get lower taxes, wider tax loopholes, bigger subsidies, more generous bailouts, less regulation, lengthier patents and copyrights and stronger market power allowing you to raise prices, weaker unions and bigger trade deals allowing you outsource abroad to reduce wages, easier bankruptcy for you but harder bankruptcy for homeowners and student debtors, and judges who will let you to engage in insider trading and who won’t prosecute you for white-collar crimes.

All of which have made you enormously wealthy. Congratulations.

But I have some disturbing news for you. You’re paying a big price – and about to pay far more.

First, as you may have noticed, most of your companies aren’t growing nearly as fast as they did before the Great Recession. Your sales are sputtering, and your stock prices are fragile.

That’s because you forgot that your workers are also consumers.....

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Unfortunately, they calculated that the global market would make up the difference for Screwing over US Workers.

[Warpy]

1. While the government keeps printing money

they've been able to play a numbers game, showing their net worth climbing as they grab more and more of a pie that's not really there any more for most of us. In the meantime, the stocks they're snapping up aren't paying the dividends they should because no one's got the money to spend far beyond subsistence and the debt faucet's been turned off to a dribble now that all those "charge me up for no interest until I know I've got you by the balls" credit cards have disappeared.

How do I know this? I'm living on interest and dividends.

The only part of the global market that was going anywhere was China, where the government has kept raising the wage so that workers feel like they've been making progress. Now their stock market has taken major losses and all that optimism that might have fueled a go-go consumer market has vanished.

Anyone serious about fixing the economy has to do three things: raise the minimum wage substantially; create public sector jobs creating the infrastructure to support the next boom, and levy confiscatory taxes on the 1% that they can avoid only by rebuilding domestic industries.

[Moostache]

5. Hear, hear!!!

This man is 100% correct...you cannot fix the economy with the same thinking that has gutted it over the past 40 years. One thing I would add; which may not immediately appear to be an economic policy position, but is utterly vital to the health of our real economic policies, is real term limits and real campaign finance reform to public elections.

We cannot allow influence peddlers to run the show any longer because they have made it crystal clear they would kill the planet for an extra 5% gain. Getting big money out of politics can only be achieved with massive reforms to the system of terms and campaigns. Term limits at a maximum of 12 years in office and fully funded public campaigns that start 30 days before they end and are tightly regulated under charges of treason and penalty of death. Its the only way to beat the 1% and end their grip on the planet. Anything else is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic...

[Rex]

2. Sadly they don't care and prefer to follow in the footsteps of history.

Greedy humans never seem to learn any kind of lessons, so we will have to go through this all over again.

[tularetom]

3. Henry Ford was a fascist asshole but there was one thing he got right

He priced the Model T at a level where any Ford assembly line employee could afford one,

[Ferd Berfel]

4. ANd paid his workers enough so that they could afford to buy it

[Omaha Steve]

6. After he fought the union tooth and nail

He once told the workers that if they could get the weeks work done by Thursday, they would get Friday off with pay. They did it. Then he upped the production quota to match what they proved they could do with a little extra effort.

OS

[Ferd Berfel]

7. true, and his wife

kicked him around about it too